A ‘Stealth’ Dogfight : Charges, Countercharges Fly in Controversy Over Screenplay, Novel

The plot goes like this: Iranian terrorists, eager to see their country become the dominant power in the Middle East, hijack a nuclear-armed Stealth bomber and in the process provoke a dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Gyorgy Fodor, a Hungarian-born filmmaker, liked the idea so much that he wrote a screenplay about it called “Stealth.”

Dennis Anderson, a night editor at the Associated Press in Los Angeles, liked the idea so much that he wrote a novel about it called “Target Stealth.”

Today, the two men are locked in a federal court fight that involves allegations that Time Warner Inc., one of America’s communications giants, participated in a high-level “cover-up” to make it appear that Anderson’s book was written first.

Fodor alleges in a copyright infringement suit that after submitting his 94-page screenplay to a high-ranking executive at Warner Bros. in Burbank in 1988, the screenplay was sent without his knowledge to Warner Books in New York and turned into 339-page novel authored by “Jack Merek,” Anderson’s pen name. Fodor claims that financing for his movie fell through as a result.

Fodor, 39, further alleges that the screenplay and book not only contain more than 50 similar plot and character elements, but that common errors about the radar-invisible bomber also appear in both works.

Anderson, 38, contends that any similarities, if they exist, are coincidence and largely stem from the fact that so little was known about the super-secret B-2 bomber before it debuted in late 1988.

But Fodor’s allegations go deeper than merely two works of fiction having similar creative elements. He maintains that Time Warner Chairman Steven Ross gave instructions to his underlings to “handle” the Fodor claim, and they then produced a paper trail of “cooked” documents.

The suit seeks up to $5 million in actual damages and an unspecified amount of punitive damages.

To shore up its defense, Time Warner has produced checks, bank deposits, certificates of deposit, company memos and letters between the author and his agent indicating the book predated Fodor’s screenplay. But Fodor said he hopes to prove that the documents have been altered and the correspondence forged, allegations Time Warner has denied.

Anderson’s side argues that to believe Fodor, one would also have to believe that the conspiracy stretched beyond Time Warner and its movie and book subsidiaries to include banks where the checks were processed and two other publishing houses which rejected Anderson’s original manuscript.

Anderson, who lives only a few miles from where the B-2 bomber was built in Palmdale, maintains that he got the book idea while covering aerospace for the wire service. He is adamant that “Target Stealth” was conceived and written fully a year before Fodor completed his work.

“I’m very proud of the book I wrote,” he said. “If there was something of a scam or conspiracy of that nature it might be natural for me to run behind the lawyers for protection, but I’ve done everything I can and provided every piece of material I can to demonstrate that this was my idea and my story and I did it by myself.”

The case has yet to come to trial, but last year a federal judge in Los Angeles refused to toss it out, saying “the general ideas of the two works resemble each other greatly.”

U.S. District Judge James M. Ideman, who is considering a second motion to dismiss the case, noted that in both works the heroes are “ace pilots who single-handedly save the world from destruction.”

“In both works, the hero has a friend who turns traitor because his family is threatened by the Iranian terrorists,” Ideman said. “Both friends die after having redeemed (themselves) in the fray. However, the hero saves the day and all is well.”

Fodor, who is being represented by Melvin Belli’s law firm in San Francisco, said the similarities in the two works are many. He cites as one example a scene where the arch villain is explaining the underlying reason for hijacking the Stealth bomber. In the screenplay, the villain is named Sadek; in the book, he is Avadek.

In the screenplay, Sadek says: “Then with the remaining nuclear bombs (exactly eight, at the end) and the Stealth we will be the most powerful country in the world.”

In the book, Avadek says: “With the eight bombs and the sophisticated delivery system (the Stealth bomber) we will not be the little guys anymore. We will not be a regional power. We will deal as equals in this dangerous world.”

Actually, the Stealth bomber carries a maximum of 16 gravity nuclear bombs.

Says Fodor: “The pilots are the same, the dialogue is the same, the villains are the same--one is called Sadek, the other is called Avadek. There is the same speech they are making. The test pilot is the very same. They all save the world from nuclear destruction.”

He also says there are “common errors” in both works.

In the screenplay, which he copyrighted in 1987, Fodor said he made a typographical error in estimating the time it would take for the Stealth to fly one way from Los Angeles to Washington. It was listed as 92 minutes. In a subsequent draft, he corrected this to 192 minutes.

“The typographical error would mean the plane would have to fly at a speed of approximately Mach 2.5,” Fodor’s attorneys said in their legal briefs. “It is a fact widely known that the Stealth bomber is strictly a sub-sonic aircraft and has absolutely no capability of exceeding Mach 0.9.”

They point out that in the closing chase sequence of the book, the Stealth bomber is supposedly flying toward Washington at approximately Mach 2.5.

But Anderson dismisses the similarity. “There were a lot of people forecasting how fast the Stealth would go,” he said. “Everybody guessed wrong. They guessed supersonic.”

As for the dialogue, Anderson said: “I am confident it will be proven in court they are not what they say they are. Plaintiffs often make claims of similarity in songs, or books and then they turn out not to be so.”

Anderson said he made up the name Avadek because he liked “the ring of it.”

“It sounded like some Farsi names that popped up in material that I was looking at, like Rand Corp. analyses, Time magazine syntheses and library books and things,” he said. “If those are the similarities, how come they aren’t the same name?”

Anderson said he wrote the book in 1986, submitted it on the advice of a Cal State Northridge professor to a New York literary agent, who then sent the manuscript in 1987 to three publishers.

Two publishers--Simon & Schuster and Crown--said they rejected the manuscript but it was bought by Warner Books for $150,000. It was copyrighted and released in February of 1989 and went through a printing of 25,000 hardbacks and 340,100 paperbacks, according to the publisher.

For his part, Fodor said his screenplay was the product of five years of “in-depth research” that drew upon his experience in avionics. A French citizen who permanently resides in the United States, Fodor said he served less than a year in the Hungarian air force, but he won’t discuss his military records.

He said he has covered various “hot spots” in Africa and the Middle East for television news organizations. Some of his ideas on the Stealth bomber were developed while doing a film at the Paris Air Show in 1985, he added.

In February of 1988, Fodor said he submitted his screenplay to Wayne Duband, a senior vice president at Warner Bros. in Burbank, with whom Fodor claims--and which Duband denies--that he has had a longstanding business relationship.

Fodor said Duband later requested a second copy and a synopsis of it and the two discussed whether actor Steven Seagal would be appropriate for the male lead. Fodor said he even met Seagal at Spago and later gave him a copy of his screenplay.

Fodor said that Duband suddenly stopped talking to him in August and then “Target Stealth” hit the bookstands in early 1989.

Fodor said he sent a friend of his to a book signing given by Anderson in Victorville, and she asked the author how he came up with the idea. She said Anderson replied: “An actor friend came to me with the idea because of my aerospace experience. The rest was easy.”

Anderson said he was not referring to actor Seagal, but to an actor and friend named Christopher Dakin.

Fodor also cites a 1989 interview Anderson gave in which he said he came up with the idea for “Target Stealth” after covering the rollout of the B-2 bomber at Palmdale for the AP on Nov. 21, 1988--two years after Anderson contends he wrote his manuscript.

According to the article, Anderson said he saw a small plane hired by Aviation Week magazine fly over the high-security area where the B-2 went on display for the news media.

“When I saw the Aviation Week photographs, I realized that if (Aviation Week) could get that Cessna 152 in there, maybe in my plot . . . I could get my team of bad guys in there. After all, that’s the idea for the book--to leave people wondering.”

Anderson said his interview was given to a student journalist at Pierce College. “There was a mistake in that article,” he said of the passage in question. “The reporter who wrote the article simply misunderstood me when I told him how I got the idea for the story.”

Fodor remains incredulous. “We are talking here about November, 1988. By then, (Anderson contends) he already had a completed manuscript purchased by Warner Books. Come on!”